The superorganism of massive collective wearables

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems "tsunami" are the "spring tide" of 5.3 billion mobile phone platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2013, an assessed market potential for 300 million smart watches in 2014, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eye-wear systems in 2015 [1].

This workshop asks the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning super-organism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "super-organism" [7], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such super-organisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate.